We'll hold your hand a little while longer (but should we?)

To say we're in "interesting times" would be an understatement. And I'm not just talking about the world shaking, world changing impact of a global pandemic and all that has wrought - though that has certainly been a catalyst for a shake up in the higher education sector. No, the times of interest I'm talking about are more aligned to the rapid changes in teaching, learning, and assessment delivery in universities in the past five or so years; changes rooted in an environment of increased power of the student voice and student choice, consumerism, and optics.

Now don't get me wrong - times have to change, universities have to change, and teaching has to change. That's what I'm all about - adaptation and evolution. I read for my undergraduate degree back in the late 90's during the age of dial-up. So access to information was still largely via libraries and the sage teachings of our lecturers. That's no longer the case. And so that, combined with so many other digital advances from the simple improvements in PowerPoint making lectures more than the god awfulness of comics sans and as many animations as one could cram onto a slide, to the beauty of cloud sharing and mobile working, means being the subject expert, renowned for your research, or just really inspiring just doesn't cut it anymore.

The concern comes when we consider our responsibility to our students, and how that can come to clash with the society-driven requirement to have them "succeed", if only on paper. Almost every university boasts it will ensure its students are "ready and able" (or some other buzz-phrase), which it honestly does want to do. But at the same time league tables, the OfS, and ministerial pressures to have students leave university with "good degrees" more often than not means the classification on the certificate and the score in the National Student Survey (the NSS). Now, grade inflation, though something often brought up as rampant in universities in order to boost their status, is to me a nonsense. How in the world anyone thinks we can possibly inflate grades when any final degree result is likely made up of anywhere between 10-50 assessments over 3-4 years, marked by a couple dozen people (at least) and of various weightings is beyond me. We would have to fudge every submission to insane levels and pray no one ever looked even vaguely in our direction to get away with it (we are just not capable of or free enough in our days to construct a conspiracy of that magnitude). But, what universities do often do, is modify the way we deliver everything to such a degree to please the students under our care, that they may come out with a degree that looks good on paper, but it may not actually mean they have anything more than good grades to get them onto the career ladder and succeed in the world.

Allow me to illustrate with a couple of examples. There is a move for more co-creation with students. This might include giving them the choice of the format of their assessment. The assessment in this case is a live presentation of something. One student says that they do not feel they will achieve their best grade if they are made to present live because they are nervous/anxious/suffer from stress. They insist on being allowed to record it and submit a video, with questions that would normally follow naturally right after and answered live in the moment now provided in text after the fact, and answered asynchronously. We acquiesce because we are enabling them to succeed and to learn in a manner that suits them. They get a good grade as a result. Then they apply for a job after they graduate and get an interview, but because we as those responsible for them being "ready and able" never pushed them outside of their comfort zone and never fostered the skill of public speaking or of having to adapt in the moment, they now do not have the ability to have a conversation with someone face-to-face in a situation where their success is on the line. So did we help them prepare for their future, or did we enable them to grade well?

Another. Lectures are recorded at the time they are delivered live in class. This is available to every student, and in many ways this is a valuable approach from a revision perspective because it means students can "be there" and engage rather than desperately try to get down every word you are saying for fear that it may be in the assessment. Attendance however, is down - a lot. The reason, on talking with absentees (when you finally see them) centres around having other things on (work, family/social matters, assessment deadlines and so on), on knowing that they can simply watch the recording around the time of the assessment, or of having mental or physical health issues that make it difficult to come in. This behaviour persists, and many end up falling into the ever popular generational grouping of "binge watching their lectures" (which is backed up by data analytics of the videos showing such, and mainly around assessment time). They do well in their assessments and get the grades. But now they have graduated with poor time management skills (on account of not being able to come to class due to not having managed their deadlines but having no reason to do so because we enabled and practically encouraged them not to come in because they wouldn't miss the learning - though the inferior version of the learning because the recording misses the atmosphere and the energy of the in-room experience). They have again not developed the ability to argue and evaluate and reason through missing the opportunities to engage in such in class. And what of those with mental health issues who couldn't come in? Well we gave them greater reason not to, or not to try by there being no real need to in order to pass. To my mind we have failed all three categories of student here. The most troubling being those with mental health issues as now we have no idea how they are, if they are feeling isolated, or indeed giving them any real reason to try to push past whatever barrier may be in place. Will that do them much good in the working world where there will almost certainly be fewer people looking out for them like we're supposed to (and want to)?

Yet another. One brought on by the pandemic and the fact we demonstrated that is possible to deliver learning online. Not deliver it well mind you (depending on what your definition of "well" leans towards, experience or grades), but it is nonetheless possible to provide content in an online fashion. Now, because content online is now a thing, there will be those who fall into both student categories identified in the previous two examples - those who feel we should teach and assess based on their own preferences and individual circumstances, and those that realise they can do other things if they don't have to have that nuisance of an education for their future get in the way. There will of course also (thankfully) be those who recognise everything we're trying to do in running our courses a certain way and come into campus, engage, talk, question, and work to the deadlines we provide. So we have the insistence of hybrid. Hybrid is an interesting form of teaching, and one that done right, done well, and done with the proper staff training and digital and physical infrastructure, can be fantastic and transformative. But it can also be a model that brings down the quality of the live experience for those on campus, further perpetuate the problems of those who weren't attending when their only other option was a recording after the fact, and increase the pressure on staff to be all things to all people and to satisfy every type of audience. If you don't have the right setup in the classroom and the right training or skillset, trying to engage with roomers and remoters (as I call them) equally becomes a task that invariably jerks everyone out of the experience multiple times throughout the class. You have to toggle between Teams/Zoom and the presentation, to check in and see if anyone has raised their digital hand, you hope someone put their camera on just to show you someone is listening at home and not watching Netflix with the sound turned down on the lecture so they appear present without actually being present. You conduct polls that remoters can do easily but roomers have to use their phones or have brought another device with them. And all the while you're recording the whole thing for later upload to provide the same absentee opportunity you did before the pandemic for those that can't or don't want to make it.

The whole thing makes the teaching a chore. Some will l say, "it works really well, they were asking good questions and everyone loved it." Others will say, "no one online said anything except to check it was being recorded." Others will say, "no one online or in the room really said anything." So it's a mixed bag, but one that can exhaust the academic and make those who went to the effort of coming all the way in feel like second class citizens. But if you don't do it, those who have more of a consumerist or grade chasing mentality will insist you are being unfair, insensitive to their needs, or that they are paying fees and so should get the experience they want.

But here's the thing. Once they graduate; once they have those high marks, with few exceptions they won't have the choice to work from home or work at their place of employment. They won't have the choice of whether to come into work at all. Can you imagine a lawyer e-mailing a client, or a judge, on a Monday morning to let you know they won't be coming to court that day because they prefer to do it online? Can you imagine almost anybody saying to their boss that they have too much on at the moment so won't be coming to the meeting but please make sure it's recorded and they'll get to it at some point? Or even of a big report due, or an operation scheduled, or (to go back to the legal example) a court date is in place and has been for weeks, only for the person to say they want an extension because they had a lot on and they should therefore be allowed to move the deadline? How fast would the world come to a grinding halt if we no longer had to work to anything? Had no ability to adapt to a situation to ensure it got done/resolved/resourced because we spent our entire time in higher education being taught we could have anything our way for the sake of league tables or the perception of the OfS that universities were doing things right because everyone coming out of them has good grades and hadn't complained to them or given a bad NSS rating?

What I'm saying, is how much hand holding should we really be doing? We hold our children's hands for a while as they cross the road. We guide them until they are old enough and experienced enough to understand the expectations and the dangers of the road, and then we let go a little, we don't hold that hand so tight. And once they've learned how the green man works, what the red light means, and have looked both ways infinites times under our supervision, we trust them to let go of that hand entirely. Surely in the sense of skill building, resilience, and the ability to adapt to the world, primary, secondary, and further education should have taken care of all that? So that when they get to university where it is an educational experience all about opportunity and building your own future, not legally mandating your use of it like in earlier education, we're no longer expected as academics to take that hand once again in a firm grip and say, "Don't worry, I'll shelter you from the world for a just a while longer. And when I finally let go there will be no safety net to catch you, no more hands to hold - but you'll have good grades."

We need to strike a balance of hand holding and letting go entirely. One of using digital to enhance our teaching, and recognising that standing up there being brilliant is about as adaptive to the social-media driven world we live in, as handing students whatever they feel in the moment is "best" for them to succeed in a way that in the long term will likely not benefit them all. My fear with the direction of travel we seem to be heading at the moment, is that we are encouraging the academic equivalent of allowing our kids to have sweets right before bed: "Well, I don't want you to have a tantrum. So although I know it's bad for your teeth and your health, I'll give them to you every time you ask and then try to absolve myself of blame in a few years when you need fillings."

But hey... they passed didn't they?